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A World Drawn From Wild Tastes

One of Molly Crabapple's live-drawing sessions at the Slipper Room with the model Honey Manko.Credit
Andras Frenyo

ON a recent fall night in Manhattan, the artist Molly Crabapple convened a group of people with drawing pads for a meeting of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, a group she founded in 2005 that now has branches all over the world. A cross between old-fashioned life-drawing sessions and new-wave cabaret, it usually meets every other Saturday at the Slipper Room, a burlesque-themed bar on Orchard Street. Typically, about 50 artists, Web designers, cartoonists and hipsters — alerted by word of mouth or the Internet — pay $12 each to draw a downtown personality like the alternative model Raquel Reed or the performance artist Amber Ray.

But this session was slightly different, as Ms. Crabapple was holding it in Times Square, in pouring rain.

The model for the evening was the comedic burlesque star Little Brooklyn, who was wearing the costume for her pigeon fan-dance act: a feather-covered teddy, thigh-high pink stockings that ended in stiletto-heeled claws, and a glittering black beak. Behind her stood Ms. Crabapple and her co-M.C., the illustrator John Leavitt, holding umbrellas. At 7:30 p.m. sharp Ms. Crabapple cried “One-minute poses!” and Little Brooklyn began to vamp, striking Betty Boop-like attitudes — hand clasped to mouth in surprise, bending forward as if to hail a cab, lifting her feathered tail to reveal pink ruffled briefs. As passers-by stopped to stare and take pictures, Mr. Leavitt encouraged them to sing, applaud and coo. “It’s like Gene Kelly in an alternate dimension,” he cried.

After a few two- and five-minute poses, Ms. Crabapple called a halt to the soggy proceedings and repaired to a nearby bar to drink absinthe. “Standing on a public street and doing something cool — it feels so great,” she exulted. Within minutes she had posted a photo of Little Brooklyn on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook.

Ms. Crabapple, 26, had been promising this event to her fans for months as a reward if 4,000 of them signed up to follow her on Twitter. (Because fall arrived before she had fully achieved that goal, she held it slightly early, at about 3,800.)

For she was perhaps the real star of the evening. A former artists’ and cheesecake model who has also done some burlesque dancing and a bit of fire eating, Ms. Crabapple is also known for chronicling the exploits of downtown nightlife personalities in an artistic style she describes as “saucy Victoriana.” Until recently she was the in-house artist for the Box, drawing performers and designing curtains and T-shirts for the vaudeville palace on Chrystie Street. With her long dark hair, artfully made-up eyes and demurely vixenish demeanor, she can suggest Morticia Addams, John Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland or an anime caricature. And because she is never far from her iPhone or her MacBook, little of her life seems unshared.

In fact, some believe Ms. Crabapple’s talent is neither making art nor modeling nor fire eating nor Internet branding, but her ability to combine everything in one seamless persona. Joe Wos, who founded the ToonSeum, the cartoon museum in Pittsburgh, calls her “one of the most innovative young artists out there right now” but argues that her influence extends beyond drawing. “Dr. Sketchy’s itself is a work of performance art,” said Mr. Wos, who runs the Pittsburgh sessions of Dr. Sketchy’s. “Molly Crabapple is an art movement in and of herself.”

Or, as Ms. Crabapple said matter-of-factly, “What you get in life isn’t about how much you cultivate your talent; it’s about how you cultivate your name.”

Certainly the last year has been good to Ms. Crabapple in terms of name cultivation. July saw the publication of her first graphic novel, “Scarlett Takes Manhattan.” Created with Mr. Leavitt, who wrote the text, it recounts the fairly pornographic adventures of Scarlett O’Herring, a fictitious 1880s New York circus performer. Its colorful pictures, made with pen and ink and colored in Photoshop, exemplify Ms. Crabapple’s style. Curves and facial features are exaggerated, bodies tumble through space, and each scene is filled with impossible Rube Goldberg-like architecture.

Photo

One of her works, the painting Box.

Ms. Crabapple’s work now appears in an ever-growing number of exhibitions, including the group show “Son of Baby Tattooville,” through Nov. 21 at the Riverside Art Museum in California, and “SuperWOW!,” a one-night exhibition at Kenny Scharf’s Cosmic Cavern in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Friday. On Saturday and next Sunday, she herself will appear at the Pixel Show, a Brazilian design exposition in São Paulo, where she will give a talk, show her work and run a Dr. Sketchy’s session. (She gives talks on online branding, too.)

Another measure of Ms. Crabapple’s proliferating ubiquity is the mushrooming of Dr. Sketchy’s. Though she founded it with the illustrator A. V. Phibes, since quite early on she has run it herself with the help of Mr. Leavitt and an increasing number of assistants. This time last year it had about 50 branches, but its numbers recently exploded to 96 chapters in cities as far flung as Anchorage; Tokyo; Bogotá, Colombia; Helsinki, Finland; Singapore; Paris; and Wichita, Kan.

Although Ms. Crabapple stays in touch with the directors of all her chapters, dispensing advice and encouragement via e-mail messages, in exchange for a nominal start-up fee and monthly dues, she prefers to run her “D.I.Y. empire,” as she calls it, with a fairly light hand. “I’m not this tyrant who’s forcing everyone to wear hats with brightly colored logos,” she said. “We’re not a colonial organization.”

The concept of authority has long been anathema to Ms. Crabapple, even in the days when she went by her given name, Jennifer Caban. Growing up on Long Island, she “was a rebellious little thing,” she said. “I loved Kurt Cobain and was a bane to my teachers.” At 17 she graduated early from high school and left for Europe, fueled by thoughts of Anaïs Nin.

Upon reaching Paris she discovered the bookstore Shakespeare & Company and began working the cash register there in exchange for living upstairs with the backpackers and bohemian intellectuals who were passing through. It seemed like this magical paradise, she said, “like something out of Hemingway.” That’s where she began drawing seriously, in a boyfriend’s gift of a large leather-bound notebook, which she carried everywhere and filled with carefully crosshatched, Tenniel-like ink sketches of the people and places she saw in her travels, which eventually took her to Lisbon; Seville, Spain; Marrakech, Morocco; then back to Paris again. “Since I had just limitless time and no money, I would just sit all day drawing in this book.”

At 18, Ms. Crabapple, having studied Arabic at the New School and read a biography of the explorer Richard Francis Burton, spent the summer traveling and drawing in Turkey and Turkish Kurdistan. She was briefly jailed for sketching in a mosque on the Syrian border but also got to see the Ottoman-era Ishak Pasha Palace. “It looks like something Dr. Seuss would’ve drawn, with all those crazy minarets,” she said. Its phantasmagorical appearance now informs her style, too.

Between her travels, Ms. Crabapple was studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she met Mr. Leavitt in a life-drawing class. Their collaborations included an amateurish burlesque act and a satirical anti-school publication. By the time they quit together in 2004, Ms. Crabapple was supporting herself as a model but growing fed up. “You were supposed to do it silently and just demonstrate tendons,” she said. “You weren’t supposed to have an opinion. I wanted to do a session that would celebrate the model.”

And that’s how Dr. Sketchy’s was born, a drawing session in which the model, not the artist, is the main event.

Partway through the first year, Ms. Crabapple began blogging about her new endeavor. To her surprise, she said, “People responded, saying things like, ‘I wish this happened in Utah.’ ” She posted a tutorial and soon had the beginnings of her empire, with nine branches as far afield as London and Melbourne, Australia.

As the numbers have grown, her internationalism has come in handy. Rather than urging her chapters to hire burlesque dancers, for instance, she suggests that they use “subcultural” models, she said. “Countries like Colombia don’t have burlesque, but every country has its own underground performance scene.”

And because so many of her chapters bring her out to give talks and run sessions, Ms. Crabapple still gets to experience foreign cultures. “When I was a little backpacker kid, I was always an outsider, trying to figure out how I could assimilate into the artistic circles of the cities I was in,” she said. “Now when I travel, I actually get to be a part of the creative community. That means a great deal to me.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 4, 2009, on page AR19 of the New York edition with the headline: A World Drawn From Wild Tastes. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe